


First

by cuneifire (orphan_account)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Relationship Study, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 03:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18541405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: She's always known where she stood with Draco.





	First

The first time she meets him he tells her that she looks lost and that her hair is ugly. She grimaces, and because they’re seven, tells him his chin is too pointy and that she'd never be stupid enough to get lost. The next time they see each other, her hair isn’t long like her mother insists it should be, but cut short. When her parents ask her why, she doesn’t elaborate. The next time they see each other, Pansy makes sure her gaze is steadfast and her eyes never wander. 

Pansy sees Draco a myriad of times throughout their childhood, mostly at galas and parties and whenever her parents feel like stopping in on his for an exchange of social niceties or vice versa. The second time they talk he tells her about how he knows French, and she lifts her chin and tells him so does she. From then on, that’s what they speak in. Pansy’s pretty sure it started as him trying to prove she was bluffing.

She likes him a lot more after that meeting. 

By the time she’s eleven, she feels comfortable enough to sit next to him and tell him when his coat looks wretched, make snide comments on the Gryffindor stupidity that seems to have infested their school for the year. By third year she’s come to the conclusion she likes him. By fourth year she’s realised her affections are not returned.

She thinks she’d known before him, even. When he took her to the ball all he would talk about was ‘Potter and his stupid tournament’ and ‘Potter the bloody cheating bastard’ and ‘Potter refused my friendship, how could he,’ and so forth. Pansy stopped listening about halfway through, but she pretended to be fascinated in the same way he pretended to care about her as more than a friend.

They were both fluent in the language of lying, but she still thinks she had him bested. She pretended not to know for longer.

And know she does, because no matter what half the houses will say, Pansy isn’t stupid. She sees the way he looks at Potter when he thinks no one else is looking- and she sees how Potter doesn’t look back. She knows the way his gaze glints and dims, the light in his eyes. She knows because it’s the same way she looks at him.

She still grabs him by the collar one evening, in fifth year, and the rest of the night is a blurred memory for her. All she can remember is the slight taste of mint on his tongue, how she gripped his suit hard enough that her hands were red for hours afterward, how there was absolutely no give.

When she pulled back, he had a smile that by then she’d figured out was actually a grimace. She had tilted her head to the side, and given him a grin so bright he had to know it was false, otherwise he had no right to be called her friend.

She had understood.

They didn’t talk for a long, long time. Oh, they were near each other plenty- Pansy sometimes doubts she could go through life without his sharp wit and coruscating grey eyes to look forward to- but they don’t say a word. She sits next to him in potions, smiles a smile that is equal parts sneer and smirk when Longbottom screws up for the millionth time and when she looks over to Draco to see he's doing precisely the same, a tiny bit of warmth amalgamates in her chest before she can even think to taper it off.

When they do talk again the first thing he says is “Thank you,” and the first thing she says is, “I’m sorry.”

There’s much more not talking after that, but the weight of silence isn’t quite so heavy.

She watches him during sixth year, more than maybe she should. She knows he’s tripping over and falling, that he’s not sleeping nor eating enough- (he never once expresses any wonder as to who keeps leaving his favourite sweets atop his bed, but by the empty trays she’ll always count that as a win). She knows that he has the Mark- he pushes up his sleeve to his elbow one day and tells her with so much pain in his eyes, “If you take it too I’ll kill you, or myself.” So she swears to him  _never,_ even if it means running away, and hopes against every rationality that it means  _run away with me._

He visits her when the war ends. He says, “I am to be engaged to Astoria Greengrass. Please come.” And there’s  _nothing_ in his eyes. She throws a teacup at him and tells him he’s awful, and she thinks she sees him grin, just a tiny shadow of that proud, sly, ridiculous boy she fell in love with.

She wants to tell him,  _no._ Put a hand on his forearm (left or right; it will never matter to her) and yell at him to  _stop. You went through all of that, the war- for what? To be miserable for the rest of your life? What are you_ doing _? Why are you incapable of being_ happy? _Of doing things that will make you so?_

She doesn’t, of course. That would make her a hypocrite.

So she pours him a glass of tea in a non broken glass and maybe halfway through the tea starts being more Firewhiskey than tea and soon they’re laughing, over what she can’t remember, and a strand of her hair falls out of place and he leans over and tucks it behind her ear and gives her a smile she thinks she’d like to keep in a vial.

“Pansy,” he says, breathless and horrendously improper. “You know you’ll forever be my dearest, correct? No matter what.”

And she smiled, so widely, her eyes going watery.

“Of course. I’ll just never be first.”

She’d understood that from the beginning.


End file.
